Christmas Evil (originally titled You Better Watch Out, and also known as Terror in Toyland) is a 1980 horror film written and directed by Lewis Jackson. It stars Brandon Maggart and costars Jeffrey DeMunn. The film has gained a cult following since its release, with praise from John Waters.
Tom Huddleston from Time Out, who rated it 4 out of 5 stars, said, “In contrast to most slasher flicks, this isn’t about anything as simple as revenge. Jackson’s concerns are bigger: social responsibility, personal morality, and the gaping gulf between society’s stated aims at Christmastime – charity, hope, goodwill to all men – and the plight of those left on the outside: the children, the mentally ill, the ones who don’t fit in. It’s a great looking film, too: one shot of a suburban street lined with glowing reindeer looks more like Spielbergian sci-fi than low-budget horror. Bizarre, fascinating, thoughtful, and well worth a look.”
Here is a link to quotes from the film, and here are links to the full movie.
I’d say that Christmas Evil is not so much a horror movie as it is a character study. There are only a few killings sandwiched in the middle of a story about a mentally disturbed man, Harry Stadling (Maggart), who has a Santa Claus fixation. Going about everywhere in a Santa suit, Harry hardly looks scary, but rather clownish, sad, and pathetic–a victim of an alienating modern society in which consumerism has spoiled a once merry holiday.
The value of the film can be seen in its critique of that society, rather than its ability to give us chills. When I say that Harry is “sad and pathetic,” I mean it in both the derisive and sympathetic sense, with a great emphasis on the latter. He is a truly sympathetic slasher, a lonely man who has no friends and gets no respect form his coworkers at “Jolly Dreams,” a toy-making company he manages, and who idealizes Santa as an escape from his cold and empty life.
The stark contrast between what Christmas ought to be versus what it is can be seen in the otherwise dull title of the film, an obvious pun on Christmas Eve, though only a relatively small part of the film takes place on that day. Christmas is supposed to be a time of togetherness, community, and love, but in our modern capitalist society, all that’s left of the holiday is crass consumerism, materialism, and the annoyance of such things as spending time with relatives we can’t stand. It’s enough to make a Grinch out of the warmest-hearted Who.
So in a sense, Harry’s descent into madness can be seen as allegorical of the heartbreak we all feel as we see our childhood innocence fade away, to be replaced with adult cynicism. It’s an eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge–paradise lost. Harry can’t accept the shift from songs of innocence to songs of experience, so he protests and rebels against it by trying to keep his childlike naïveté alive as Santa. His is a protest against the pain of reality.
The story all starts on a Christmas Eve in 1947, when little Harry and his younger brother, Phil (the adult version of whom is played by DeMunn) are with their mother on the stairs by the living room in their home, watching “Santa” (actually the boys’ father) come down he chimney, eat the milk and cookies provided for him, and leave presents for the family under the Christmas tree. Phil, though a kid, has the sense to know that it’s their dad dressed as Santa, but Harry is captivated by the sight.
There’s one detail from this scene that ought to be paid close attention to: the boys’ mother is beautiful…and by beautiful, I mean she’s smoking hot! I’m not trying to be a creep here, for I believe that there is significance to her attractiveness, as far as Harry’s psychology is concerned. It should be obvious to you, Dear Reader, what I’m getting at–especially obvious if you’ve read my other blog posts.
Yes, I know I harp on about the Oedipus complex a lot here, but I feel justified in doing so, since as Don Carveth has defended it, the Oedipus complex is a universal narcissistic trauma. A child has to learn that he or she cannot hog the Oedipally-desired parent all to himself or herself forever, but must instead share the mother or father with the other parent, with everyone else, and must allow the desired parent to have a life of his or her own. It’s about the painful realization of sharing people, not greedily keeping them to oneself and treating them as a mere extension of oneself.
Now, the Oedipal feelings for the desired parent don’t have to be sexual and incestuous, as in the classical Freudian version of it, but in little Harry’s case, I’d say they are, to consider how beautiful his mom is. That he has such feelings for her, however repressed and unconscious they would undoubtedly be, is made apparent when we see how upset the boy is to see “Santa” later sexually groping her leg, with her garter showing. It’s akin to the primal scene. She’s enjoying the groping, giggling. Combined with little Phil’s insistence that “Santa” is their dad–Father Christmas, as it were–the experience traumatizes little Harry, who wants to be Santa in order to be his father and thus have her…of course, this wish is repressed.
Now, there’s something we have to understand about the unconscious mind and the repressed: what is repressed returns to consciousness, but in an unrecognizable form. Psychoanalysts don’t use the word “subconscious,” as the pop psychologists do. What is repressed isn’t hidden somehow ‘underneath’ consciousness–it isn’t ‘below’ what is known…it is simply unknown, unconscious, hidden in plain sight, because it has reemerged in a form one cannot consciously recognize as such, and therefore it won’t cause one guilt, shame, and anxiety.
This kind of repression is what has happened to Harry. It’s inconceivable that he would recognize his desire to take his father’s place and have his mother: to recognize his incestuous desires as they really are would horrify him. Therefore, they must be repressed and must come back into consciousness in a form that seems totally unrelated to the incestuous fantasy–he wants to be Santa Claus.
It’s significant that we never see Harry’s and Phil’s father not dressed as Santa Claus: the point is that the father is equated with Santa, at least in Harry’s mind. By the end of the film, Harry complains to Phil that he said it was their dad dressed up as Santa, rather than the real Santa. But Harry doesn’t seem to remember “Santa” groping his mom. The first reason for this forgetting is, as I’ve implied above, motivated by Oedipal jealousy; the second reason is that Harry can’t bear to face the reality that the world isn’t the innocent place he wants it to be.
Little Harry is so upset to see “Santa” being “dirty” with his mom that he smashes a snow globe and cuts his hand with the jagged edge of some of its broken glass–this is symbolically his narcissistic scar. Later in the film–when he as an adult realizes that a coworker has tricked the “schmuck” into working his shift for him in Jolly Dreams so the liar can go off for a few beers in the local pub, rather than spend time with his family as he claims is his plan–Harry holds a toy in his hand and crushes it, a similar expression of his narcissistic injury. He hates all acts of naughtiness in our corrupt, adult world.
Christmas is his only escape, into innocence, from this world, hence at home, he’s often in Santa-like clothes (the red hat, etc.), he hums Christmas songs all the time, and he has Christmas decorations all over the place. He’s doing this sort of thing even before the arrival of Thanksgiving.
Now, lots of people annoyingly get into the Christmas spirit long before December, but with Harry, it’s truly pathological. His fixation on Santa perfectly personifies how far too many people out there idealize holidays–not just Christmas, but also Halloween, Chinese New Year, etc. It’s truly sickening how, just after Thanksgiving, so many Americans go insane shopping on Black Friday; how quickly one forgets one’s supposed gratitude with what one has, in a mad dash of acquisitiveness for sales of more and more stuff.
My point is that way too often, we have an unhealthy attachment to ‘special occasions’ like Christmas and birthdays, then revert back to our miserable ordinary lives as soon as those special days are over. We need instead to find a way to make our everyday lives happier, more charitable, and more communal. Harry’s pathology represents that excessive attachment to only one day as the ‘happy’ and ‘innocent’ one.
In his Santa fixation, again, long before Christmas has come, Harry spies on the kids in his neighbourhood with binoculars. No, he isn’t a sex pervert: he’s far too sexually repressed and insistent on maintaining a sense of innocence to have any sexual interest in anyone, let alone children. Like Santa, he’s checking to see which children are being naughty, and which are being nice. In fact, he gets quite angry to find one boy, Moss Garcia (played by Peter Neuman), lying on his bed and looking at nudie pictures in a Penthouse magazine! Harry immediately goes back home and writes in his book of ‘Bad Boys and Girls’ that Moss is having “impure thoughts.”
We often see Harry standing in front of a mirror at home, sometimes clearly in a Santa attitude with either shaving cream on his face to look like a Santa beard, or wearing a fake Santa beard. This use of the mirror is undoubtedly Lacanian: Harry’s ideal-I is Santa, so he sees himself as Santa in the reflection, hoping he can live up to that moral ideal, all while the real Harry looking at the specular image is fragmented and alienated from himself.
About forty years of age, Harry has no woman, as does his brother, Phil, a married father. Harry’s coworkers treat him with no respect. He cancels going to Phil’s house to have Thanksgiving dinner with his wife and kids, causing him to be all the more worried about Harry’s increasingly erratic behaviour. We see Harry go to Phil’s house the night before the cancellation, looking through the front window sadly and watching Phil and his sons playing on the sofa. Trapped in his narcissistic idealization of and identification with Santa, Harry cannot leave that dyadic child/parent world and enter the society of many Others.
He makes a Santa suit, wig, and beard for himself, and he decorates his van with a painting of Santa’s sleigh. He’s set up everything to aid in his delusion that he’s really Santa Claus, come to rescue us all from the cynical, depressing adult world and bring it back to the sweet, innocent, childlike world he so misses.
He walks down his neighbourhood and hears the kids there tell him their wishes. When Moss says he wishes for a lifetime subscription to Penthouse magazine, Harry is infuriated. At home, he looks in his book of ‘Bad Boys and Girls,’ and sees the page with the list of Moss’s sins; he decides that the naughty boy needs to be punished.
Harry goes to the boy’s home at night. He smears mud on his face and hands, mud from the side of the Garcia house, and he puts hand prints of the mud on the outer wall by a window. He’ll hide in the bushes and attempt to grab Moss as he’s about to leave home with his mom, who’s already angry with him for not wanting to go with her. When the boy tries to explain to her how a “monster” in the bushes tried to get him, she–fed up with his non-compliance–slaps him. This is the kind of lack of innocence, Moss’s and his mother’s, that Harry cannot tolerate in the world.
The root of Harry’s problem is in what Melanie Klein called the paranoid-schizoid position. It’s ‘schizoid,’ because Harry’s world is split between the white of innocence (the white of snow, or of Santa’s beard) and the black of our corrupt world (the black of that mud, or of the dirt he fills bags with to give to naughty kids–like Santa’s coal gifts–or the dirt Harry gets on his Santa suit, since despite all of his efforts, he cannot split off and expel the bad from himself…after all, he’ll kill people). It’s ‘paranoid,’ because Harry will feel the persecutory anxiety of the expelled badness coming back to him, in such forms as the torch-bearing mob who pursue him for his crimes at the end of the movie.
Harry cannot reconcile in his mind the black and white of our world into the grey of what Klein called the depressive position, an acknowledgement of how everyone is really a combination of good and bad, of innocent and guilty. Such an acknowledgement would be truly depressing for Santa-worshipping idealists like Harry, but his much healthier brother, Phil, can do it, hence Phil’s entrance into society, marriage, and fatherhood. Harry will remain in his lonely, narcissistic, infantile world of seeing Santa in the mirror, though.
The next disappointment Harry has to deal with is how capitalism can poison even what should be the festive and charitable spirit of Christmas. He attends a Christmas party for all the staff of Jolly Dreams, where he sees Mr. Wiseman (played by Burt Kleiner), the owner of the company, on a TV there saying that Jolly Dreams will donate toys to the children of the local hospital if production increases enough and the workers contribute their own money. The profit motive is always prioritized over kindness.
Harry is introduced to the man who devised the donation scheme, new training executive George Grosch (played by Peter Friedman). Though Harry as manager is supposed to be on the executive side of things now, and therefore be sympathetic to the need for “good business,” he feels as alienated from the company’s big brass as he is from the workers he left behind in his promotion, those unionized workers who have no respect for him.
Deciding he’s had enough of this cynical world, Harry steals bags of toys from the Jolly Dreams factory, fills other bags with dirt for the naughty kids, and on Christmas Eve, he glues a Santa beard to his face and goes into a fugue state in which he believes he really is Santa Claus. In a Santa suit, he goes around town giving gifts, first to Phil’s house, then he gives a bagful of dirt to naughty Moss, then gifts to the hospital, where a guard is annoyed with him, but soon after, the hospital staff appear and show him their appreciation for his generosity.
You’ll notice that none of this is particularly scary. It’s just a character study of a lonely, alienated man who’s been driven over the edge by an uncaring society.
Next, Harry goes to a church where Midnight Mass is being held, and Grosch is at a pew next to another Jolly Dreams executive, one who is nodding off. Both men are bored there; they’re clearly there only out of social obligation and with no real charitable intent. Harry is outside, at the bottom of the steps, waiting for the people to come out.
It seems that he knows that the Jolly Dreams executives are there, for he has a toy soldier with a spear on it, and he has a hatchet, both of which he’ll use as weapons, presumably on the two men he despises. Instead, though, the first of the people to leave the church and come down those steps to address him are some young adults, presumably of the upper classes. These snobs taunt him a bit, so he uses the weapons to kill them instead of the executives, leaving the dead to lie in their blood on the snowy ground.
Harry rushes off in his van to get away from the screaming others. The executives and their wives look down at the carnage from the top of the steps, and I’m guessing that they recognize their Jolly Dreams toys have been used as murder weapons. Finally, we’ve had a real slasher movie moment, over fifty minutes into the film.
The next place Harry goes to is another Christmas party, one in a restaurant. The overdue buildup to horror has just been deflated. Instead of more suspense, tension, and eerie atmosphere, we see ‘Santa’ being invited into the party by a pair of tipsy men. Harry has been looking in the window, watching all the partiers, and in his loneliness wishing he could be a part of the merriment, and now he can, in spite of his shy reluctance to.
Meanwhile, the police are starting their search for him.
At the party, Harry enjoys being welcomed and accepted by the people there, especially the sweet little kids. He dances with them, and he tells the kids they have to be good if they want good gifts instead of something…”horrible.” In this moment, he’s able to enjoy some of that coveted innocence as well as to promote it among the kids.
He leaves the party, and as he’s riding away in his van, he imagines himself calling out to Santa’s reindeer, each by its name, as if he were riding Santa’s sleigh in the sky. That party just indulged him in his delusions. We hear dissonant piano notes in the soundtrack to remind us that Harry is still not well.
He’s also thinking about Frank (played by Joe Jamrog), the coworker who made Harry work his shift so he could go out and have beers at the local pub. Enraged at his having been used and humiliated, Harry wants revenge, so he goes to Frank’s house to kill him.
Harry gives us yet another example of how pathetic he is when he tries to enter Frank’s house through the chimney. He may not be as fat as Santa, but in his delusions he still doesn’t realize he lacks Santa’s magical abilities, either, so it takes a while for Harry to snap out of it and accept that he cannot fit in the chimney. Again, this absurdity deflates any possible sense of building the tension one should find in a horror film.
He enters the house through a side window by the ground (and ridiculously, he neglects to close it, letting all the snowy cold in the house). He leaves gifts for Frank’s kids under the Christmas tree, then goes up to the bedroom to kill Frank, first by trying to smother him with his bag of gifts, then by slitting his throat with a sharp end from a Christmas star from a tree by the bed. His wife, beside him in bed, wakes and screams at the sight of his bloody body as Harry runs out of the house.
Meanwhile, on Christmas Day, Phil has learned from the TV news about the killings, and not knowing where Harry is, he worriedly suspects his brother of the crimes. Harry’s Santa suit is fittingly getting dirty. He goes to the Jolly Dreams factory and, annoyed with the poor quality he sees in the toys on the assembly line, he destroys them.
The police round up men in Santa suits from all over the city to see if any of them is the killer, which of course none of them are. (One of the police, Detective Gleason, incidentally is played by Raymond J Barry, who was the grumpy, insensitive police captain in Falling Down, who didn’t like Sgt. Prendergast [played by Robert Duvall] because he never cursed.)
To get back to Harry, he’s on the phone with Phil, who is “sick to [his] stomach” worried. Harry tells him he’s “finally found the right notes,” and he “can play the tune now.” This is “the tune everybody dances to.” Phil, of course, has no idea what deluded Harry is talking about, as didn’t a coworker at the Jolly Dreams Christmas party when Harry mentioned “the tune” there. He tells Phil he’ll play his tune, everybody will dance, and Phil won’t have to worry about him anymore. Harry hangs up.
Now, what Harry means by “the tune,” apart from being a Christmas song like “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” (presumably), isn’t any clearer to us than it is to Phil or that coworker, but I imagine it to be symbolic of the idea of the music of the spheres. A literal, audible music is not believed to be heard, as Johannes Kepler imagined, but it represents what was believed to be the underlying order and harmony of the universe, that innocence and goodness that Harry craves.
In the ancient, prescientific world, the heavens and therefore space (the sun, the moon, stars, and planets) were perceived to be perfect. It was only here on Earth that imperfection, sin, existed because Satan was “the god of this world” (2 Corinthians 4:4), or of this present age. This Pythagorean view was adopted by the ancient Church, and the innocence of this belief was challenged by later astronomers like Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, who introduced such models as elliptical orbits and sunspots. Such fantasies of perfection would be most appealing to Harry.
The perfection of heaven, up in the sky where we imagine God and the angels to be, is also where Santa is supposed to be flying in his sleigh with the reindeer, up there with the moon, too. It’s an idealized fantasy world to which we can escape from the miserable reality of our lives down here on Earth, and that’s why Harry wants it to exist so badly. It’s the heavenly, innocent world of children, for to enter the kingdom of heaven, one must be as a child (Matthew 18:3).
In connection with the Christian associations of Santa Claus, we of course know him to be derived from St. Nicholas, who gave children gifts back in the fourth century, back when the Pythagorean cosmology was still the dominant one. Harry in his narcissism would like to think of himself as a saint, full of nothing but goodness, which is a reaction formation against his hostility and violence, as well as against his repressed Oedipal feelings.
While I’d say that Christmas Evil is subpar by horror movie standards, it does also have its virtues. Apart from its important themes of the tension between innocence and sin, and its character study of a lonely, troubled man, the movie is gorgeously filmed, with vivid colours and bright lights, as can be seen especially in the scene when Harry, having got his van stuck in some snow, walks into a neighbourhood at night with beautiful decorations and bright lights. He sees many decorations of glowing Santas on sleighs, as well as glowing Frosty-the-Snowmen. He must think he’s in Christmas heaven.
There’s a huge full moon in the sky. Harry gazes at it in his ongoing delirium, which is fitting for this lunatic. It’s a bright, circular light in the darkness, a Pythagorean island of innocence in a sea of sin, his little bit of Christmas in all of the evil around him. He is similarly dazed by all of the bright decorations of reindeer on the houses he’s walking by.
A group of kids run up to him, imagining he’s as much the ‘real’ Santa as he thinks himself to be. One would think this might be a terrifying moment in the film, but it’s been established that he won’t kill children; the worst he’ll ever do to a naughty boy or girl is give him or her a bag of dirt.
A sweet girl among the kids notices how dirty his suit is; he tells her it’s because of all the pollution in the world, his way of once again symbolically splitting off the bad in himself and projecting it out onto the world. The parents of the children arrive, and they’re terrified for their kids, knowing who Harry must be.
The father of the little girl takes out a knife and prepares to defend her from Harry, but the kids, having received gifts from ‘Santa,’ don’t want the man to attack Harry, so they stand in front of ‘Santa’ to defend him. Since Harry is truly no threat to the kids, we can see in this scene the ironic wisdom of the kids’ naïve innocence versus the folly of the adults’ cynical view of the world.
Indeed, we see more irony in the little girl’s…innocent disobedience…of her father when he tells her to return his switchblade to him after he’s dropped it in the snow. She gives it to Harry, who cuts her father with it when he tries to stop Harry from escaping. The parents help form a torch-bearing mob to chase him. As he runs, he falls into a pile of garbage, getting his suit even dirtier: the evil he tries to project keeps coming back to him, symbolically and literally, soiling his ‘innocence.’
We next see a group of lit torches floating in the black of night, a dialectical, yin-and-yang contrast to the white of his Santa suit that has been blackened with dirt. He’s practically weeping with fear at being chased by the mob; this is the persecutory anxiety that is part of the paranoid-schizoid position, for the evil that he splits off and projects will always come back to him…it’s always part of him, and it cannot be removed from him.
He manages to get back to his van, get it out of the snow, and drive away from the mob. Then he goes to Phil’s house, where he’ll confront his brother about having said the “Santa” of their childhood was really their dad, and how this memory traumatized little Harry, at a time that included “Santa” doing something with the boys’ mother that was anything but innocent…not that Harry seems to remember.
He complains to Phil that he’s failed to get the people to accept his “tune,” to accept the innocence and purity of the music of the spheres, his purity that results from splitting off and projecting everything bad. Phil, exasperated with his brother’s mental health issues and horrified that he’s killed people, strangles Harry until he loses consciousness.
After Phil puts Harry back in his van, he wakes up and punches Phil, then drives off. The mob is still chasing him, and he drives off a bridge.
Now, we naturally should expect the van to crash below, with Harry badly injured and soon to be apprehended by the police (or beaten to death by the mob), if not killed in the accident. Instead, we see the van flying up toward the moon (his lunatic, Pythagorean home) as if it really were Santa’s sleigh, and we hear a voice-over reciting the ending of “The Night Before Christmas,” just as we’d heard the beginning of the poem at the beginning of the movie.
We the audience are sharing Harry’s delusion. Reality has become much too painful to bear. We are also splitting off and projecting the bad, and indulging with Harry in his innocent fantasies. Like Norman Bates, in police custody at the end of Psycho and fully deluded that he’s his mother, Harry fully believes he’s Santa.
The real horror of Christmas Evil is not in the killings and blood. It’s in the witnessing of a lonely, unhappy man losing his mind and escaping to a childish fantasy world, a regression to an innocent time, because our real world has become too evil to endure…even at Christmastime.
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